Tag: literary fiction

#BookReview Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price @WorldEdBooks

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Planet of Clay 2About the Book

Rima is a young girl in war-torn Damascus. Her feet seem to work independently, she says. Is this an affliction? Or is she just an inquisitive, adventurous young child? Her exhausted mother keeps her tied with a rope around her wrist to stop her wandering off.

As a young girl, Rima also loses the ability to speak, although she can recite sutras of Qur’an. And she can use her voice to scream – which, tragically, happens more as the story progresses.

Hidden in the library of the school where her mother works as a cleaner, she finds refuge in a fantasy world full of coloured crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur’an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits.

Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she’s crazy, but she is no fool – the madness is in the battered city around her. One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta – where, between bombings, she writes her story.

In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek offers a surreal depiction of the horrors taking place in Syria, in vivid and poetic language and with a sharp eye for detail and beauty.

Format: Paperback (320 pages)        Publisher: World Editions
Publication date: 26th August 2021 Genre: Literature in Translation, Literary Fiction

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My Review

I don’t think Planet of Clay is a book I would have picked up had it not been for Ruth Killick and World Editions kindly sending me an advance review copy.  How glad I am that they did because reading this book was to enter a strange, unsettling world and meet an unforgettable character.

Translated from Arabic by Leri Price, Planet of Clay‘s narrator, Rima, recounts her story in a non-linear fashion, switching back and forth in time between different memories of events she has witnessed.  The stories seem to pour out of her, with many left unfinished as she takes up another story, along with frequent promises that she will return at some point to complete the earlier stories.  As she admits, ‘I’m writing without restraint and without sequence’. This takes some getting used to but I found it best to go with the flow and see where Rima took me.

Through Rima’s eyes the reader experiences the horror of daily life in war-torn Damascus: checkpoints, armed militia and tanks on the street, aeroplanes flying overhead and the sound of bombs falling across the city. ‘We wait, every day, for the bombs to fall on us.’ At one point, she muses, ‘I don’t understand how a giant plane can come and kill small, weak people in such quantities.’ Quite.  Rima witnesses random acts of violence, one of which results in the death of her mother, just one of the people who disappears from Rima’s life. Worse is to come as parts of the city are subjected to attack from lethal weapons. In the words of Rima, ‘the planes and the sky rained smells in August‘.  Rima herself suffers the after-effects of this attack.

Rima’s view of the world is different from those around her, sensed as colours rather than words, and expressed through drawings. For her, ‘every adjective in language is like a painting‘. The writing has moments of intense beauty with some memorable turns of phrase, often influenced by Rima’s beloved The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. ‘Love is a group of small planets with long thin arms dancing then lacing together into a knot of dazzling light.’

Before long, Rima’s existence has contracted to a tiny cellar room which she cannot leave. She perceives her life as a series of planets, and retreats in her mind to the most secret of them, one which is ‘hard to invade’ and cannot disappear until she disappears too. And as for the book’s title?  As Rima observes, ‘We are toys made out of clay, small toys, quick to break and crumble’.

Towards the end of the book Rima observes, ‘You are starting to know my theory now, about circular stories with intersecting centres which are only completed by retelling and new details’.  The stories Rima tells are heartbreaking and paint a unique picture of a world gone mad. I’m sure I won’t be the only reader to see parallels with the terrible events taking place in Afghanistan.

In three words: Mesmerising, imaginative, moving

Try something similar: The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan

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Samar YazbekAbout the Author

Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novels include Cinnamon (2012) and Planet of Clay (2021). Her accounts of the Syrian conflict include A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (2012) and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015). Yazbek’s work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards – notably, the French Best Foreign Book Award, the PEN-Oxfam Novib, PEN Tucholsky, and PEN Pinter awards.

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About the Translator

Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. Price’s translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature (US) and winner of the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was shortlisted for the ALTA National Translation Award. Price’s other recent translations include Sarab by award-winning writer Raja Alem.

#BookReview Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller @PenguinUKBooks

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Unsettled GroundAbout the Book

What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant? What would you do to get it back?

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Their rented cottage is simultaneously their armour against the world and their sanctuary. Inside its walls they make music, in its garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.

But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. At risk of losing everything, Jeanie and her brother must fight to survive in an increasingly dangerous world as their mother’s secrets unfold, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake.

This is a thrilling novel of resilience and hope, of love and survival, that explores with dazzling emotional power how the truths closest to us are often hardest to see.

Format: Hardcover (289 pages)         Publisher: Fig Tree
Publication date:  25th March 2021 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

I read Bitter Orange back in 2019 and described it as ‘intense, atmospheric, unsettling’. Intense and unsettling are descriptions that could equally be applied to the author’s latest book, if not more so. Just have a close look at the cover and you’ll discover that what initially looks like a collection of flowers and fruits actually conceals a picture of decay.

The sudden death of Dot, their mother, leaves Jeanie and Julius bereft and unsure of what the future holds for them, living as they do on the margins of society. Fairly quickly they discover that their mother was not quite the person they thought she was as secret after secret comes to the surface.  That knowledge forces them, especially Jeanie, to reconsider the people they thought they were as well, to rewrite their own history.

I liked the perceptive way the book dealt with bereavement, and how the awareness of the absence of a person can strike without warning. At one point, while Julius and Jeanie are playing music as a duo rather than a trio as they formerly would have, Jeanie hears their mother’s banjo ‘like a vacancy in the music; the sparring and blending between the three instruments is missing, her voice absent.’ Jeanie wonders if this is how loss happens – ‘eventually after every activity has been carried out once without Dot’s presence – the potting on of tomatoes, the making of a rabbit pie, the playing of each song, Jeanie will no longer notice her mother is gone.’

The book is a poignant picture of two vulnerable people lurching from one crisis, one disappointment, to another and ill-equipped to cope with the modern world. They live on the edge of a village with an infrequent bus service, where the telephone box has been converted into a library and the delicatessen stocks foodstuffs that Jeanie and Julius could never afford.  It was heartbreaking to witness Jeanie in the local store counting out her pennies in order to decide if she can buy either toilet rolls or shampoo, or forced to eat condensed soup from the can for want of anything else.

For me, the book was really Jeanie’s story. Although it was clear to see the bond between brother and sister, I felt Julius rather faded into the background and that I didn’t know him in quite the way I did Jeanie; as if, although always present, he was somehow remote. I may not have been completely convinced by the motivation of the person who carries out the dramatic event that takes place towards the end of the book but I could certainly believe in Jeanie’s raw grief at its consequences. Prepare to have this book put you through the emotional wringer but, at the same time, leave you believing there is always hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

Unsettled Ground is book 16 of my 20 Books of Summer 2021.

In three words: Intense, perceptive, poignant

Try something similar: Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves by Rachel Malik

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Claire FullerAbout the Author

Claire Fuller was born in Oxfordshire, England, in 1967. She gained a degree in sculpture from Winchester School of Art, but went on to have a long career in marketing and didn’t start writing until she was forty. She has written three previous novels: Our Endless Numbered Days, which won the Desmond Elliott Prize, Swimming Lessons, which was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Award, and Bitter Orange. Her most recent novel, Unsettled Ground, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Winchester and lives in Hampshire with her husband.

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